Category: Developer

“Won’t using open source in my products mean I have to give away my IP?”

These are all examples from real-world conversations with both external and internal stakeholders during my career as a developer and consultant. There are many more such examples, which I previously built into a blog titled Top 10 Signs Your Enterprise Doesn’t ‘Get’ Open Source. The good news is that with the emergence of Linux, Apache, JBoss and other important open source technologies, we don’t hear these kinds of things as often. The bad news is, there are still quite a few industries and companies where these fears are the norm.

In this article, we will convert a web project generated by the JBoss Developer Studio CDI Web Project wizard to a Maven project. Doing so will give you the power of the Maven build system with its dependency management, build life cycles, and automated JEE packaging abilities. Follow these steps:

a. Right click on the project name in the Project Explorer tree and select Configure → Convert to Maven Project… In the wizard steps be sure to select WAR packaging.

With the growing popularity of cloud environments and cloud-like architectures, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm has become increasingly important. Having been the previous big buzzword in IT, the term SOA has often been used as a means to sell software products instead of a term to refer to architectural style. However, in order to benefit most from the new possibilities in virtualization, just-in-time provisioning and on-demand scalability it has become a must for businesses to partition their enterprise logic and functionality into individual components which can independently be deployed in heterogeneous environments.

One of the goals of an SOA is to provide the enterprise with a set of re-usable, readily available business services, and as such reduce cost and provide greater operational agility. The autonomous nature of well-defined services make these components the perfect candidate for deployment in cloud environments. These individual services can then be combined, or composed into business applications which provide the actual business value. The specific compositions of these services in fact defines the actual business process.

Becoming EMEA’s Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year was very easy. I just wrote a letter and crossed my fingers, haha. Jokes aside, I believe I became a Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year because when I entered my submission, I not only wrote a reply, I relayed how Red Hat is integral to both the story of my life and in my career. From the innovative projects I’ve participated in to the satisfaction of our customers, Red Hat has meant a lot to me.

I started using Red Hat technologies in the mid-90s when open source was still unknown by many and ignored by almost everyone. I remember my first installation of Red Hat, which was at a public company in a small town called Sao Luis in Brazil. It was where I was born and raised. The company needed a reliable solution to run an electronic mail system, and at that moment the only platform that met our needs was to use the Red Hat Linux with Sendmail. I never stopped using Red Hat technologies after that, using Red Hat and open source for more and more projects.

Being chosen as the worldwide Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year has been a bit surreal. It has been an incredible honor and fantastic experience, especially being at the Summit this year. One of the questions I have been asked over the past few weeks is, “Sean, how did you do it? How were YOU the one chosen as the RHCP of the year?” The easy answer is that I wrote an essay and they chose me. But I believe that the real answer at the heart of things is open source, the community and many years of experience.

My first introduction to Linux in 1993 with Yggdrasil LGX was a spectacular failure. I’d found Yggdrasil for $10 at a local computer expo and bought it because I thought it would be neat to learn something about Unix. It lasted maybe a week and then it was off my system and forgotten. I couldn’t get networking to work. I couldn’t get X-Windows to work. I barely knew how to list files in a directory. What went wrong? I could point to a lot of things but my main trouble was the lack of hardware support and my complete lack of Unix skills. In retrospect, the biggest failure was that I had no idea about the Linux community out there (and without an Internet connection, I had no way to access it).

The following is an excerpt of a post originally published on June 29, 2012, on Vinny’s Tech Garage.

I’m really excited about CloudForms. In my recorded demo at Summit, I showed a RHEL 2-node active/passive cluster with GFS off an iSCSI target. Then I moved all the underlying CloudForms Cloud Engine components to shared storage. I was able to launch instances, fail over Cloud Engine, and see the correct status. After managing the instances, fail back, and all was good. All of this works because the RHEL HA cluster stops the databases and other services first, moves the floating ip over, then starts the services on the active node. This was a very basic deployment, much more could be explored with clustered PostgreSQL and sharded Mongo.

One of the core tenants of agile development is to focus on the tasks that are the highest priority and immediate need. This is sometimes referred to as “Just-in-Time” development. The idea is to focus on the tasks needed to ship the feature now and worry about everything else when it is actually needed. Another tenant that goes hand-in-hand with “Just-in-Time” is the idea of failing early. Basically, a team should know as early as possible if something is going to fail, that way the team does not waste time going down the wrong path. This means the team should develop a feature and solicit feedback in short cycles, allowing the team to quickly understand what works and what does not.

It has been a little over a year since Quint Van Deman was named 2011’s worldwide Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. Out of 600 submissions, Van Deman, an RHCA and director of open source consulting at Emergent, stood out with his experience helping clients move from last-generation, proprietary IT infrastructures to next-generation architecture that embraces the synergy of open source, open standards and cloud-based solutions. With the next winner set to be awarded on June 28 at Red Hat Summit in Boston, we wanted to catch up with Quint to hear the story that won the title, what he’s working on now and how his past year has been.

So, what story did you submit to win the award?

What I really wrote about was my journey to becoming an RHCA and how that really benefitted my professional endeavors. The journey to becoming an RHCA really exposes one to the breadth of solutions that are out there in the Red Hat stack, and how those solve organizational challenges. I was very clearly able to take some of those direct lessons and apply them out into my work. Also, how the RHCA really provides what I call the ‘instant badge of credibility’ when I walk in somewhere. A lot of time when you go into an organization as a consultant, there’s a lot of what I call ‘technical chest-bumping,’ where there will be someone in the room whose only objective of the meeting is to prove that they are smarter than you. Having that RHCA up there really defers a lot of that, especially with folks in the room that may have taken a Red Hat exam.

Continue reading “Checking in with Quint Van Deman, 2011 RHCP of the Year”